Kacy Gordon-Postdoctoral Fellow

Kacy began studying biology at Dartmouth College, where she majored in Genetics, Cell, and Developmental Biology and completed an undergraduate thesis in the lab of Dr. Kevin Peterson. She worked as a technician in that lab, and at the NIH in the lab of Dr. Yingzi Yang. Kacy got her MS and PhD degrees in Organismal Biology and Anatomy from the University of Chicago, where she worked in Dr. Ilya Ruvinsky’s lab on the evolution of gene regulation in nematodes. She is currently working on the enwrapment of germ stem cells by their niche, the distal tip cell. Enwrapment can be recapitulated ectopically by muscle cells, and appears to be a common feature of stem cell niches. Kacy is developing the first experimental model of an ectopic stem cell niche, with the hope that it will shed light on processes involved in cancer metastasis. She and her husband Daniel, who is also a biologist, love to play with their toddler daughter, Ramona. Kacy likes to cook, read, garden, and fix things around the house.